Assessing spread risk of Wuhan novel coronavirus within and beyond China, January-April 2020: a travel network-based modelling study

Shengjie Lai; Isaac Bogoch; Nick Ruktanonchai; Alexander Watts; Xin Lu; Weizhong Yang; Hongjie Yu; Kamran Khan; Andrew J Tatem

Due to current limited knowledge of the epidemiology of the virus at the time of writing (e.g. the proportion and infectiousness of asymptomatic or subclinical infections) and the rapidly changing situation of the outbreak, the simplicity of our approach to define importation risk can help to quickly update risk assessments, prioritise surveillance, target limited resources and understand the potential of 2019n-CoV introduction at specific destinations [32] . Compared with other studies [33, 34] , we explored the various scenarios of travel restriction and used a more comprehensive and spatio-temporally detailed population movement matrix, together with details on the actual final destination cities of air passengers based on the global itinerary dataset. These novel datasets provide new insights on the impacts of internal and international connectivity on potential transmission of this emerging pathogen during the LNY holiday and over the next three months.